Abstract

Anticipation has recently been rediscovered by psychologists as a fundamental aspect of human cognitive–motoric activity. Cognitive anticipation is connected to goal directedness and purposefulness of mental activity. Humans perceive and cogitate in service of goals and purposes, i.e. in an action-related and action-relevant way that gives special status to goals and anticipation. With this in mind, I suggest that there are three fundamental and distinct kinds of prototypical situational schemes, or naïve event ontologies, which are defined and distinguished by the underlying causal scheme. These three ontologies are characterized by prototypical anticipatory schemes.